Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Ruined house model in 20mm (roughly HO or 1/72nd scale) by Sentry Models (AT06 Detached Ruined House), ordered from RLBPS (Bob Bowling). The house is a single resin casting, except for the bit of flooring on the second level. Enjoyed good service from these folks, would order more from them.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Military chaplains: a Presbyterian pastor patrols with his flock of soldiers in IraqArmy Capt. Ron Eastes carries a big responsibility - but no weapon - in his 'ministry of presence' with the 82nd Airborne.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

I am finding that I love modeling scenery as much as I love painting soldiers. I think miniature wargaming has the potential to combine the best of model railroading with toy soldiers to produce visually satisfying results. So that's the theory.

Here's a model in progress. It was originally a Walther model railroad kit, which I wanted to turn into a ruined factory in some war-torn town. The complete story of its creation can be seen here . When finished, the roof will be removable to place chaps (20mm or HO or 1/72nd scale) inside. The details inside are bricks that I chopped up out of foamboard (too big, I think) and the debris and green machine thingy are scraps that my friend James gave me from his auto-parts plant. Much work to do but it's coming along nicely.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.’ (Luke 20:38)

This morning I want to offer a few comments about remembrance and hope. These two things are important to today, of course, but they are also important to the faith which gathers us here week by week, year by year.

Today is a day of remembering. It’s not about remembering specific events, because there is no one alive today who can remember what it was like at Vimy Ridge or Passchendaele. In a few years more, a decade at the most, there won’t be anyone left alive who can remember what is like at Dieppe or what it felt like to be caught in the flak and searchlights over Germany. All we can do is remember the people who went before us to these terrible places. We can remember the people we knew – parents and grandparents – and we can remember the ones we didn’t know, the ones who are just names and strangers to us.

Why do we remember? The reasons are complex. We remember them because their lives were significant, and because the loss of their potential, so many who died so young, can never be fully appreciated. We remember them to do them honour, because they gave what Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address called “the last full measure of devotion”, paying the ultimate sacrifice for those they loved and for we who came after them. We remember them because it is our responsibility to remember them, because we owe them. If we decided to cancel November 11th and just forget about the past, we would be the less for it. Our society would somehow be diminished if we abandoned Remembrance Day.

These are good reasons to remember, to be sure, but I think the third and most important reason we remember is because of hope. We have the hope, again to quote Lincoln, that “these dead did not die in vain”. We have the hope that their deaths made the world a better place. We have the hope that peace and freedom are great gifts, to be defended if necessary, but never to be squandered or abandoned needlessly. We have the hope that we have learned from history, and that things will work out for the better. If we did not have hope, Remembrance Day would be a tragic event, nothing but the naming of victims, and history would be a trap that humans are forever caught in.

Christians are people called to remember and called to hope. God calls us to remember – to remember him and to remember that we are his people, and to remember the way God wants us to live. God also calls us to hope – the hope of Christ’s power and resurrection, the hope that we can change and that the world can change, and the hope that we will be saved. We believe in memory and hope because we believe that these things come from God. A God who created the world must surely remember everything and everyone in it, and a God who sends his son to save the world must surely have hope for the future. We see both these things clearly in today’s gospel.

In today’s reading from Luke, Jesus has finally reached Jerusalem. Not everyone agrees with his preaching and teaching, and not everyone agrees that Jesus is the Messiah, the one sent by God to save his people. A group called the Sadducces set out to challenge him. The Sadducces were Jews who did not believe in the resurrection. As far as they were concerned, once you die, that’s it. Game over. They challenge Jesus with the riddle of a woman who in turn marries seven brothers in accordance with a Jewish law called Levirate Marriage According to this law, if a man died, it was the brother’s duty to take his sister-in-law in marriage, and he was to name the firstborn after his deceased brother, “so that his name may not be blotted out of Israel” (Deut 25:5-6).

The Sadducces I think are like people who go to a funeral and say, “Well, Joe’s dead, he was a good guy, but he’s gone and the best that we can do is remember him”. As far as they are concerned, the best we can hope for is to be remembered by having our name and our memory continue in our descendants, which is the purpose of Levirate Marriage. If God intended to do something as radical as raise people from the dead, he wouldn’t have given this law to his people. The women in the riddle wouldn’t have needed to remarry, because her first husband would be alive again on the day of resurrection. For the Sadduccees, God is either trapped in history or he has lost interest in it. Their God has set things up a certain way, cleaned his hands, and said “this is the way it’s supposed to be, muddle along as best you can.”

But as I said, we are people of hope because we believe that God isn’t finished with history. God isn’t content with the way things are. God will change things for the better. Jesus tells the Sadducees something that human categories like marriage will change in heaven, so their question is irrelevant. We will be changed into “angels and .. children of God, being children of the resurrection” (Luke 20:37). We don’t really know what Jesus means by this. Certainly it tracks with what St. Paul says elsewhere about how human categories like gender, race, and social status will no longer count in God’s new creation (see Galatians 3:27-28), but other than noting this continuity I think it’s vain to speculate too much about what this might mean. All we can be sure of is that we will be made new, and made better.

Personally what I take comfort from is what Jesus goes on to say. “And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.’” (Luke 20:37-38). Take a minute to let that sink in. God is talking about his memory. He is saying that in his eternal memory, all of us are alive – Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the seven brothers of the woman in the riddle.

It would be like God saying to me “I am the God of Michael Peterson, and of his father Allan Peterson, and his father Arthur Peterson, and his father …”. Now I knew my father, but after his death I realized that there were many things about him I didn’t know and would never know. My grandfather Arthur was dead long before I was born, and I only new a few things about him. I have only the vaguest idea of who my great-grandfather knows, and likely never will never know more. I can try as best I can to pass what I know of them on to my children and, perhaps, my grandchildren, and give them the few mementos that my father left to me. But memories fade, stories are lost, and I have no guarantee that those to come will remember Arthur, or Allan, or Michael.

Likewise we who gather today face an impossible task. We can try to remember the dead of our wars as best we can. We can do wonderful things, like the project this year of giving each schoolchild who went to Vimy Ridge the name and details of a Canadian soldier who died in that war. We can talk to the veterans while they last, and capture their fading memories. We do the best that we can, but we know, as our hymn today reminds us, that “time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away”. Not so with the mind of God. We have the promise in the words of our gospel that God will not forget us.

Let me close by asking you to try, if you can, to let go of one image and replace it with another. Try to let go of the traditional image of God’s memory, the image of that big book at St. Peter’s desk where all of our misdoings and mistakes are kept for the day of judgment. Think instead of God remembering all of you that is important – who you loved, the best that you can be, your fondest hopes and greatest dreams, your most selfless moments. Think of God holding these things clearly in his mind, as clearly as your best and brightest memory of your childhood summers, and brighter still. Finally, think of God calling these memories forth on the day when he will recreate the world, creating you anew, as something angelic, a child of the resurrection. On that day none of us will be forgotten. We will be remembered, fully and gloriously, along with our grandparents and their grandparents and all the names on every cenotaph across this country and overseas, to stand with those in the graves marked “A Soldier Known Unto God”. For surely that is our best and brightest hope, that each of us is “known unto God”.

Thursday, November 1, 2007

On November 1st, St. George's of Middlesex Centre, one of the churches I serve, played host to the Deaner of Medway's All Saints Children's Day. This event is one of a series of events organized by deanery youth ministry coordinator Heather Brown. Medway deanery offers two events a year, one on All Saints Day (1 Nov) and one at the beginning of Lent on Ash Wednesday, and takes advantage of Ontario legislation that excuses children from school to attend a day of religious instruction. Because this was All Saints Day, we thought we'd take advantage of the host church's name and tell the story of George and the Dragon using crafts, drama, stories and games. A video of the event, shot by Heather Brown, can be seen here. There are digital pictures and captions as part of my Facebook site. A video of the event, shot by Heather Brown, can be seen here.

A script and outline of part of the day's events is posted below. You are more than welcome to use it or adapt it as you see fit.

Morning SessionFacilitator talks about the importance of saints. We believe as Anglicans that saints are role models – they teach us how to be Christian. By their example, we learn what it means to live the kind of life that God wants us to live.Today we are going to have a visit from a very special saint, St. George! And here he is now!Voice off:Left, right! Left, right!Marching off, to the fight!Gotta be strong, do what’s right!Gotta love God with all my might!Left, right! Left right!Company ...... HALT!

Looks around, surprised.

Well, hello there!I say, I’ve been marching for a long, long time.I could use a bit of a rest.Do you mind if I take off my armourAnd sit down for a visit?

My name’s George. How do you do?They call me SAINT George, but really, George is fine.And what are your names?

So pleased to meet you.They told me you were studying ME.And they told me that this church is named after ME!Fancy that! Isn’t that kind of you!I say, I would love something to eat.May I please have one of those cookies?Thanks awfully! How nice. Very tasty.So, what would you like to know about me?

The children might ask, or be prompted to ask George to talk about his life.

My life? My goodness, that’s a long story and it’s rather hard to tell.You see, I’ve been around for such a long time, there’s a lot to remember.I guess I should start back in the year 400!That was a long, long time ago.I was a soldier in the Roman Army.As a soldier I had to be brave and strong and ready to fight.But, I was also a Christian.I believed that Jesus was our Lord and Saviour, the Son of God.And that was hard, because in those days,If you were a soldier, you weren’t allowed to be a Christian.Sometimes it’s hard to be a Christian.Perhaps it’s hard for you, when you’re friends don’t go to churchAnd you can’t be them them when you’d like to on Sundays.Well, one day they found out that I was a Christian.They said, George old boy, you can either give up this being Christian business,Or, well, if you don’t, we’ll just have to chop your head off.My goodness, that was a hard choice.

What did I do? Well, it was simple. I said I would stay a Christian.Even if they chopped my head off.

Was I scared? I should say so. I was scared stiff.But you see, I remembered what the Bible saidAbout having faith and putting on the armour of God.I knew that I could trust God and he would protect me.No matter what happened.

Well, I’m still here, aren’t I?You see, saints are hard chaps to kill.We’re God’s reminders.Whenever someone is scared,Whenever someone wonders what’s the right thing to do,Whenever someone needs a good example, they can look to us.

Years and years later, some soldiers from England heard about me.They heard about my fight with the dragonAnd they brought my story back to England.They made me the national saint of England.That’s why my red cross on a white shieldbecame part of the British flag.

What dragon? My goodness, THE dragon.Have you never seen a dragon?Well, the dragon has lots of different names.Some people call him the devil, some people call him Satan.The important thing is, the dragon is whatever is bad.Anything that goes against God’s plan for the world is a dragon.Anything that tempts us to do bad things,Anything that tries to get us to love ourselves more than other people,Anything tries to get us to put ourselves ahead of other people,That’s a dragon.I fought the dragon many times.I always chased him off, but he always came back.I’m always ready to fight him.

That’s my story, and that’s why,Whenever people remember me and tell my story,They talk about St. George and the dragon.If we go into this church that is so kindly named after me,I bet that we can see some pictures of me and the dragon.Let’s go look, shall we?

That was very interesting, wasn’t it?Did you know that you too can be dragon fighters?That’s right! All of us Christians are dragon fighters.When we were baptized, our parents and our godparentsAnd the whole congregation in church that day,Promised that they would teach us to fight againstSatan, the devil, and all the bad things in the world.So that makes us dragon fighters, doesn’t it?Our family and our church family promised to help usTo grow up to be dragon fighters.

Now, as dragon fighters, how are you going to fight the dragon?What sorts of things would you need?.

Those are all good answers.I have some more answers, from the Bible.In a book of the Bible called Ephesians, Paul(Paul was also a saint, a good fellow, Paul)Writes this advice for dragon fighters.

“God is strong and he wants you strong. So take everything that the Lord has set out for you, well-made weapons of the best materials. And put them to use so you will be able to stand up to everything that the Dragon throws your way. ... Be prepared. ... Take up all the help you can get, every weapon God has given you, so that when it’s all over you’ll still be on your feet. Truth makes the best belt, fasten it tight around your waist. Doing what’s right in God’s eyes makes the best armour, so put that on over your chest. Wear good boots, that make you want to tell how great God is wherever you may go! Faith and trust in God makes the best shield against whatever flames that old dragon spits out at you! Your best helmet comes from Jesus, who died to save us all from sin. Finally, your best sword isn’t a sword at all, but it’s the Holy Spirit that we learn about in the Bible, which teaches us how to be God’s people. And always, always, pray for yourself and for other people, and use prayer as your lifeline to God.”

This paraphrase of Ephesians 6:10-18 is inspired partly by Eugene Peterson’s The Message and is partly my own paraphrase of the NRSV.

So, how does that make you feel?Do you think you’d be safe with all those things?

So since St. Paul finished by asking us to pray,Can I pray with you?

Gracious God, thank you that through our baptism,You gave us the power to be dragon fightersThrough the love of your son, Jesus Christ.Help us always to be strong to do what is good in your eyes.And whenever we do wrong things,Please forgive us and help us to try again and do better.We ask these things in Jesus’ name. AMEN.

Well, friends, it’s been so nice talking to you.Thank you for taking the time to learn about me on my special day.More importantly, thank you for wanting to be God’s dragon fighters.I pray that God blesses you and keeps you close to Him always.And now, well, a dragon-fighter’s work is never done.That old dragon is out there somewhereand I’ve got to keep looking for him!I’ll see you later! Goodbye!

After the visit from St. George the children can engage in crafts or activities.After a break and before lunch, the Dragon will visit.

Dragon enters singing to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon”I’m Ruff the Nasty Dragon!I’m scary as can be!I love to be mean and ferocious,And make people frightened of me!

So, whaddya’ think? Are you scared?I bet you are! I bet you’ve never seenA dragon as scary as me? Well??

Well, you oughta be scared!Who do you think I am? Barney the Dinosaur?Well, I ain’t no nice guy like him.I’m MEAN! I’m RUFF THE NASTY DRAGON! Fortunately for you guys, today I’m not very hungry!On the way hear I ate a farmer AND his combine,And a whole field of cows! So good thing for you I’m full!Well, almost full. I’ve always got room for a cookie ... or two ... or three.Gimmee those cookies! . Mmmmm, delicious.

So, what are you guys doing here today? How come you’re not in school?

Saint George? So that’s what he’s calling himself these days, is it?LOSER George is more like it.I’ll bet he told you he won the last time we met?Yeah, I’ll bet he did. I’ll bet he even got folks to name a church after him.Say, what’s this church called?

Oh, man! That guy! What a nerve.Well, don’t you BELIEVE a word of it!The last time we met, SCAREDY George was running away calling forHis mommy!“Oh, mommy, mommy, save me from the big nasty dragon!”Hmmph!Saint George. Don’t make me laugh!

Look, kids, let me set you straight. Forget all that stuff.St. George made it all up later because he’s a LOSER.Face it, kids, nice guys always finish last.How do you think I got to be such an important dragon?By being NICE to people?Forgetabout! They don’t call me Ruff the Dragon for nothing!I got this name ‘cuz I’m Rough and Tough!So remember, kids, nice guys finish last.If you want to succeed in life, you gotta look out for number one!You gotta be rough and tough, like me!

Well, kids, enough talk. Gotta run.So many people to be nasty to, so little time.Hmm, maybe a cookie for the road.Say you don’t mind, do you?Ha! As if you could stop me!

I’m Ruff the Nasty Dragon!I’m scary as can be!I love to be mean and ferocious,And make people frightened of me!

Facilitators use this time to talk with the children about the dragon.What did they think about him?Is it better to be loved or feared? What did Jesus say (talk about the Golden Rule, love one another as you would love yourselves.Talk about the dragon as a symbol of evil Ask children to identify other bad things, other sources of evil in the world (eg, child slavery, internet pornography, use of child soldiers in the third world, violent drug crime in schools, etc What are Christians supposed to think about these things?After getting some thoughts from children, return to what St. George said about the Ephesians “Whole Armour of God” text in light of our baptismal vows. Our parents and godparents/sponsors promised at our birth to help us become people who would resist evil. Paul in Ephesians talks about the things that help us resist evil – prayer, faith, etc.

After lunch, St. George returns for a visit.

Hello friends! Did you have a good lunch?Jolly good! You can’t be dragon fighters on an empty stomach!I say, speaking of dragons,you haven’t seen that old Dragon around, have you?You have? By jove! I thought so!My dragon sense was telling me there was trouble nearby?

Look, now that you’re all dragon fighters,How about we put on our coats and bootsAnd go see if we can see signs of him?

St. George leads the children outside to look for signs of the dragon.As they uncover signs, St. George looks wary, strokes his chin a lot,And says things like “By jove” and “Can’t be too careful” and the like.

After returning to the parish hall:

Well, dragon fighters, you better be careful.I’m going out for another look.Remember, if you see that dragon,Just call for St. George and I’ll be there to help you!

St. George leaves.Shortly thereafter, Ruff the Dragon appears, singing.

I’m Ruff the Nasty Dragon!I’m scary as can be!I love to be mean and ferocious,And make people frightened of me!

George: I don’t need an army, Dragon.I’ve got the shield of faith, the power of prayer,And the love of Jesus Christ on me side.You know what the Good Book says?It says, “At the name of Jesus, every knee shall fall!”

Dragon: Well, THIS knee ain’t falling,And I ain’t falling for you!Get ready to be a dragon burger!

Dragon : Owwww, that hurt!Whad’ya go and do a thing like that for?

George: I was defending myself!I don’t want to hurt you, dragon,But I am a dragon fighter,And you are an evil dragon.

Dragon: But you did hurt me!Do you think it’s any fun being an evil dragon?You’ve been having a good time in hereWhile I’ve been lurking outside all day.I don’t have any friends.

George: Well, you don’t have to be an evil dragon.

Dragon: Yes I do. I can’t help it. It’s the way I am.It’s the way I am!Boo hoo hoo!

George: There there, dragon, don’t cry. Come on, cheer up.Look, you don’t have to be an evil dragon.God didn’t make you to be evil.God made everyone in the his own image.That means God wants all of us to be his friends.

Dragon: Even dragons?

George: Even dragons, if they want to be God’s friends.Do you know what else the Good Book says?It says that “Nothing can keep us apart from the love of God.”That includes you, if you want God to love me.

Dragon: How do I get God to love you?

George: God loves you already.All you have to do is say after me.“I’m sorry that I did bad things.”“Thank you for loving me.”“Thank you for sending me your son JesusTo forgive me for the bad things I’ve done.”“Help me from now on to be your friendAnd to share your love with the people I meet.”

Dragon: That feels better.Do I have to do anything else?

George: Well, you could apologize to these childrenFor scaring them and stealing their cookies.

Dragon: Ummm, I’m sorry I scared you and took your cookies.

George: Children, do you forgive Dragon?Why don’t you give Dragon a hug?

Dragon looks happy, hugs and high fives the children.

George: So, Dragon, how do you feel now?Dragon: Well, I feel different!I feel like a new dragon! I like it!It makes me want to say thank you to God!

George: So why don’t you stay and worship God with us?We’re going to celebrate the Eucharist now,And have a meal of bread and wine together.The Eucharist means “Thank You Dinner.”So, will you stay for dinner?

Dragon: I think I will!

We close with the Eucharist. While it is being set up, a facilitator can ask the children what they have learned from the event. The children can be reminded about being dragon fighters and resisting evil, but as the dragon’s “conversion” reminds them, nothing is greater than God’s power of love and forgiveness, “For God so loved the world” (Jn 3:16).

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Ethics training in the CF currently focuses on helping personnel to make good choices, using individual "gut checks" to ask if a course of action is right, or asking themselves, "what would mom think if my actions were on the news". In this approach, abuses can be attributed to bad judgement or character flaws on the part of the abuser. But what happens when abuse is perpretrated by a system or culture, which is the thesis of Philip Zimbardo's book, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (Rider and Co, 2007), 9781844135776. Zimbardo is famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, a study which attempted to understand the psychology of imprisonment.

Zimbardo's book comments on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, which the US attempted to attribute to the actions of several low-ranking "bad actors". Here is part of Martha Nussbaum's review of this section of the book:

"Zimbardo concludes that situational features, far more than underlying dispositional features of people’s characters, explain why people behave cruelly and abusively to others. He then connects these insights to a detailed account of the abuses by United States soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, where, he argues, the humiliations and torments suffered by the prisoners were produced not by evil character traits but by an evil system that, like the prison system established in the SPE, virtually ensures that people will behave badly. Situations are held in place by systems, he argues, and it is ultimately the system that we must challenge, not the frequently average actors. He then sets himself to analyse the features that make systems and situations bad, and to suggest ways in which they might be remedied."

Nussbam's critique of Zimbardo is that he tends to speak as if systems determine human psychology, "and the insides of people explain nothing at all". She argues that emotional development is just as important in explaining individual responses.

"Philip Zimbardo does not focus on emotional development, but it is surely a key part of the future of any society that is going to refuse to go down the road of the SPE and Abu Ghraib. What the guards in the experiment crucially lacked, when they lacked the ability to see the other as human, was empathy and its close relative, compassion. Compassion, as Daniel Batson’s wonderful research has shown, is closely linked to the ability to follow the story of another’s plight with vivid imagination. Situations can certainly encourage this ability, as Batson’s experimental situation did. Nonetheless, the imagination is a muscle that gets weak from routinized thinking and strong from vigorous challenges, and this suggests a vital role for the arts and humanities in any curriculum for good citizenship.

Let us hope that The Lucifer Effect, which confronts us with the worst in ourselves, stimulates a critical conversation that will lead to more sensible and less arrogant strategies for coping with our shared human weaknesses."

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

As part of our games day at the church last Saturday, a semi-regular event which the players have dubbed "AngliCONs", we fought a massive and very strange pulp game which was the brainchild of James Manto (of Hotlead fame) and Lorenzo Gionet, two gentlemen whose taste for the weird and the arcane is a cause of awe and wonder to their friends. We are very fortunate to have this rare radio news recording of the game.

Music Then Announcer: We interrupt this broadcast of the dance music of Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra to bring you this live report from our correspondent in Pottersville.

Pottersville, PA - building models various maunfacturers from the collections of James Manto and Keith Burnett. Mike "La Bete" Barratt looks on

Reporter: This is Jim McConnell for the Columbia Broadcasting System reporting from Pottersville, Pennsylvania, where something amazing is happening. I'm here at the demonstration of the amazing new mechanical workers, or robots, from Russia. Ladies and gentlemen, these are extraordinary gadgets. They look like large dustbins on legs, with arms ending in huge grippers or pincers that look like they could cut through steel. In fact, a while ago, I was watching as they were bending steel I-beams. These things are terrifically strong, and they are being controlled by these three scientists from the Soviet Union. Here's one of them now. Sir, a word of you please. What is your name?

McConnell: Yes, Dr Shol ... ummm, Dr. What are these amazing gadgets of yours all about?

Scientist: Is very simple. Are robots, mechanical workers to do all manner of modern industrial tasks.

McConnell: What for? Why can't human workers do these tasks?

Scientist: Robots will free human workers from tyranny of the capitalist dialectic, allowing them to truly become owners of means of production, ensuring harmony between states.

McConnell: Ummm, yes, I, ummm, I see. Ladies and gentleman, the good Russian doctor is holding some sort of box that appears to control the robots, I'm guessing through radio waves. The robots are walking back and forth, to the amazement of the towns folk, who are gathered in large numbers to watch.

Robots perform to the amazement of townsfolk in the main square of Pottersville as police maintain crowd control.

McConnell: Here's the chief of the Pottersville Police Department, Chief Cruller. Chief, any comment about what's going on here? I noticed a lot of feds on my way in - some army trucks, what looked like Bureau men, and a lot of your boys. Are you expecting any trouble here today?

Cruller: Trouble? No, I don't think so. Some folks don't like these tin cans here, we've had some threats. Some of the folks here are worried about losing their jobs, but that's your typical Red agitators and New Deal troublemakers at work. If things go ugly, what with my boys, the G-men and some other heavy hitters, we'll be just fine. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be getting to my command post.

McConnell: Certainly, Chief. Well, it is an incredible sight to be sure. I'm moving over to a group of men who are watching, some with heavy work coats on. Sir, what do you think of these amazing contraptions?

Man: They're abomminations! They'll put me and me family out on the streets! We're goin' to stop this once and for all.

McConnell: An angry man, to be sure, and he's not alone. What's this? A huge shadow is moving across the centre of town. People are looking up and .. there it is, ladies and gentleman, a giant airship. I can't see any markings, I can't tell you what it's doing here, just this giant shape hovering over the square.

Mike (Zeppelin Truppen) Barratt shows the limitations of our special effects budget as the airship hovers over Pottersville - the airshop is a Lego conversion by Dan Hutter.

McConnell: A mystery, folks. But what's this? There's pushing and shoving over there in the square. This looks like trouble.

McConnell: Ladies and gentlemen, I'm seeing a fight starting before my eyes! These workmen are lunging for the scientists with clubs and metal bars. One of the Russian gentleman is reeling with blood on his lab coat. There's a shot, and a man is down, and another! One of the cops has a tommy gun now and people are running and Ladies and gentleman, excuse me, while I take cover!

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please stay with us. We now take you to a program of dance music from the Empire Lounge in the Ritz Hotel in Upper Manhattan. Gene Krupa and the boys offer some spirited dance melodies.

A mob of angry workers rush the scientists, while PPD officers try to protect the foreign dignataries.

McConnell: Ladies and gentleman, this is Jim McConnell again. I've moved to a position of cover and I'll stay on the air as long as I can to bring you this story. I'm watching the police struggle to protect these scientists, while people are running for their lives. I see men on the ground in police blue, and some of the rioters, too. It's amazing, but I've also seen these robots strike men down in defence of their creators, it's as if they know what they're doing. And that airship I told you about, men are dropping from it now, men in brown uniforms are descending on rope lines to the ground - I see a squad of them now over by the hotel.

Droning sound is heard overheard.McConnell: NOW what? Ladies and gentleman, the airship has moved on, and now I see the silver shape of a Ford Trimotor approaching. men are jumping from it, and flying, each held aloft on a plume of flame. It can only be ... is it? YES! Ladies and gentlemen, it's America's finest, the Rocket Corps! Perhaps they can restore order to this scene.

US Rocket Corps land on rooftops adjacent to the main square. In the bottom of the picture, Chief Cruller leaves the saloon to take command of the police in the square.

McConnell: The square is quickly vacating as the surviving police escort the townsfolk away. I can see Chief Cruller hurrying out of the saloon to take charge of the scene, while the Rocket boys are conferring. Let's see if I can pick them up.

Rocket Corps Lt: Those airship boys look like ... yes, they are. Nazis! I hate these guys! Sgt, you take your section down there and secure the south end of the square. I'll take my section over and we'll get these Krauts the heck out of Dodge!

McConnell: The Rocket troops are flying into the square now, and as I look south, I can see more men approaching the square. This looks like trouble. Gangsters, by the looks of 'em. More than a few are packing heat. I can see Chief Cruller eyeing them warily, while a few newspaper boys are taking pictures. And ... oh no! Oh ladies and gentlemen, the humanity! The gangsters are opening up, a hail of lead. Chief Cruller and the reporters are bowled over like ninepins and lying there like broken dolls! Who are these murderous maniacs?

The vicious X-Men gang, led by my bloodthirsty son John, gun down some innocent civilians and Chief Cruller. These gangsters were in the pay of Dr. Evil, who wanted a robot specimen, but John interpreted his rules of engagement fairly loosely.

McConnell: Unbelievable, folks. I'm keeping my head down, but I can see the rocket troops confronting the strangers from the airship over by the hotel.

Rocket Troop Lt: This is your only warning! You Nazis get back on that balloon of yours and get the heck out of the United States of America, or we WILL use deadly force to remove you.

Rocket troops confront German Zeppelin Truppen at the hotel while the Pottersville PD struggle with rioters.

McConnell: To the south of me the Rocket Troops are now trading shots with the gangsters - I can see men going down on both sides. Across the square, amidst the warehouses, I can see more men in uniform - US Marines by the looks of them, and more trouble as what appears to be another mob of gangsters come marching towards the square. Ladies and gentlemen, some folks want these robots pretty bad, by the looks of things.

US Marines under their introspective and solipsistic OC, Lt. Walter, try to decide whether what they are hearing and seeing merits intervention, while another gang of baddies in the pay of Dr. Evil approaches the square.

McConnell: Those sirens you can hear are police reinforcements. More of the PPD are dismounting and wading into the riot. I can see some protesters in handcuffs now, being marched back to the wagons in no uncertain terms.

Police pursue their victory objectives by arresting protesters and removing them the little white rings on figures show they are arrested. To the top of the picture, Rocket Troops hold off gangsters, while to the right, more Rocketeers face off against Nazis, both sides keeping their weapons trained on one another. Meanwhile, the robots have formed a square to protect the Soviet scientists in the centre.

Another phase of the game involved the local Tong gang facing off against cultists. Here we see the Tong skulking in a sinister manner through the alleys of Pottersville. McConnell was too distracted to hear the sounds of their gunfire as they ambushed and shot down several cultists.

McConnell: There's a loud gunning of engines now, I can see a delivery van with some crazy fool of a driver racing into the square. With a loud thud the van collides broadside into the wall or these strange robots. A figure from the van throws something at the scientists, there's a loud explosion, a flash of light, and at least one of the scientists and several of the robots are thrown to the ground. I can see blood all over his once - clean lab coat.

The notorious X Gang drives a commandeered van into the robots, killing one scientist and wounding another with dynamite. My son John was very proud of this unexpected piece of mayhem.

McConnell: Ladies and gentlemen, things are going from bad to worse! It's hard making sense of this! I can see the robots now ... they appear to be going beserk! These strange machines are attacking police, rioters, gangsters, without any discrimination! The gangstes won't be using that white van any more, I just saw a robot punch it's claw right through the engine block! There's the sound of heavy fire coming from the warehouses where the Marines are, and now the Rocket troops are firing at the men in brown by the hotel! What's this? More mysterious men in brown are rushing into the square from concealment - by their brown overalls, leather boots and gloves, they must be from the airship. They're rushing for the robots and for the scientists. The police are resisting, but they are too few. And that shadow again -- the airship is back! I can see rope ladders dropping into the fray!

Mike Barratt's Zeppelin Truppen break cover and rush the melee to secure a robot for Der Fuhrer and for the sinister dawn of a perverted science.

McConnell: It appears that one of the immobilized robots is being winched into the airship .. I can see it swaying ponderously up and into the gondola. There's machine gun fire coming from the Marine positions but it's too late, these mysterious men in brown are scaling the ladders and the airship is starting to climb. I can see the red swastika at the tail ... Holey Moley, folks, these are Germans, in America! I'm sure Congress and the President will have a thing or two to say about this. And now, with a roar and a whoosh, America's finest, the Rocket Corps, are lifting into the air in pursuit. Will they catch them?

Well, folks, that pretty well concludes this report from Pottersville. It was fun and silly. The robots were amazing, but they proved vulnerable to ordinary dynamite and bullets. Mike Barratt played his cards well and was able to win the game by snagging one (albet a damaged one) to take home to the Fatherland for analysis, assuming that Sky Captain doesn't intercept him en route home. My police forces were stretched hard and unable to protect both the foreign scientists and the good people of Pottersville - Chief Cruller will have a donut named in his honour. The Tong furthered their mysterious ends, while the Italian mafia held back and let the Anglo gangs slaughter themselves in pointless mayhem. Final verdict, we all had fun.This is Mad Padre, signing off from Pottersville, PA.

Last Saturday saw another gathering in my church hall for another gaming day, a semi-reglar series of events christened by the participants as "AngliCONs". For Anglicon III, Keith Burnett, one of the most industrious gamers I know, offered a World War One flying battle featuring the "Algernon Pulls It Off" rules published by club favourites, Too Fat Lardies.

Like all TFL card games, this one is card-driven, so their is a high degree of randomness, offset by the fact that experienced pilots have significantly better chances to maneuvere, evade and shoot than their inexperienced colleagues. The most hapless of all are novice pilots, or "sprogs", who are like the thousands of turtles hatched on the sand, one or whom might grow to be adults, while the rest become fodder for predators.

For aircraft, Keith had purchased a hot ticket on the miniatures market at the momemt, the pre-painted 1/144th scale Wings of War models. With some homemade dowel altitude extenders, and a green cloth representing the fields of France far below, we were good to go.

Here's what we it looked like as we flew into battle:

Leading the charge was the English ace Capt. "Corky" Manto in his Sopwith Camel. My wing commander was Mike "Le Gros Bete" Barratt in his Spade; I was a veteran pilot but not an ace, while Mike was a junior ace. A flight of three Fokker triplanes was coming at us, while the English were tangling with three Albatros scouts. I figured my chances of survival were pretty good as long as Mike stayed close to me. Using the Spads' height advantage, we got behind the Triplanes and I broke formation to turn right onto their tails, only to be dismayed when Mike and his otherwingman turned left to help the English take on the Albatros flight. Mon dieu!

"Corky" was enraged that the bloody Frogs were trying to poach his kills and made his displeasure felt, rapidly sending an Albatross flying towards Paris with a badly wounded pilot who kept repeating "Must not black out" in German. Meanwhile, Dan Hutter as the dreaded Black Claw (his first choice of a nickname, "The Black Vegetable", was vetoed by his mechanic) shot down the junior Camel pilot.

Every pilot wants to earn his wings. We had a set of wings from our Christmas pageant in a closet nearby, so I declared that these would be given to the first player who would get himself posted to a heavenly billet. This unfortunate honour went to Leutnant Walter Von Winker, an Albatross pilot who fell to Corky Manto's guns. Here is Walter as he flits off to heaven:

Meanwhile, in a fine moment of oedipal conflict, I maneuvered my ungainly Spad onto the tail of my son John's triplane and sprayed lead in a liberal fashion, barely putting a hole or two into his fabric. This would be the sum total of the damage I did that day. John veered off, using his rotary engine's right torque to break my tail, and headed off to help the doomed Walter. Sadly, John would fall to the guns of "Corky" Manto, his second kill of the day. Behind me I could hear the cursing of Barry "Boche" Holden as he tried in vain to get a break in the cards that would allow him to shoot me. Poor Barry never managed to cause any damage and fly home in a Fokker Huff.

The rest of the battle was confusing, as I had little time to follow it. The Black Claw finishhd off his Frog, then landed, and appeared to have a liason with a French milkmaid. Mike "Le Gros" Barratt flew around in circles overhead, telling the German to come out from under the haystack and fight like a man, but the two never came to blows and the Claw flew off safely, his mysterious business concluded. A number of sprogs crashed, unable to recover from tricky maneuveres which they rashly attempted. "Corky" Manto flew home so that he and the chaps in the Mess could talk about how spiffing he was. Gun empty after blasting away and not hitting a sausage, I opened up my throttle, climbed to my ceiling, and flew home, leaving "Boche" Holden shaking his fist at me in vain. Here was the landscape after we left it littered with broken aircraft and bleeding pilots:

Keith did a great job of navigating us through a new set of rules, although the Too Fat Lardies use a core set of mechanics that seem to show up in all their rules. Keith had the clever idea of not telling us how much ammunition we had remaining, so Corky Manto was deprived of the pleasure of his third kill when his gun went dry with a one second burst when he expected eight seconds of hot lead. In theory the players could have kept track of their ammo but we didn't and who really would in a dogfight? Richard Clarke and the chaps on his listerserver were very gracious about answering our questions after the game, and I am sure that we'll be flying lard coffins again fairly soon. Two thumbs up for Algernon Pulls It Off, and predictions that more of us will be getting little planes to go with what my wife calls our "little men".

I cam across this by chance while visiting Baltimore crime writer Laura Lippman's blog. Say what you want to about the NY Times' political slant, the pictures are unnerving. Nina Berman's exhibit reminds us of our obligation to care for those who come home so badly damaged.

One of the more shocking photographs to emerge from the current Iraq war was taken last year in a rural farm town in the American Midwest. It’s a studio portrait by the New York photographer Nina Berman of a young Illinois couple on their wedding day.

Friday, August 17, 2007

By Mary Wiltenburg | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor from the August 13, 2007 edition

WÜRZBURG, GERMANY - No one looked comfortable at the sentencing hearing. Not family and friends who packed the US military courtroom's straight-backed benches. Not the rookie Army prosecutor in stiff dress greens who flushed with every "Your Honor." Not Judge R. Peter Masterton, whose usually animated face was now grave.

And not the convicted deserter – Army medic Agustín Aguayo – on the stand in a US military court in central Germany last March, pleading for understanding.

"I'm sorry for the trouble my conscience has caused my unit," Private 1st Class Aguayo said, his voice thick with emotion. "I tried to obey the rules, but in the end [the problem] was at the very core of my being."

Thursday, August 16, 2007

If you grew up in a family with a grandfather, father, or uncle who served in World War Two or Korea, then you are probably well on your way to appreciating this book. The World War Two bit is important because the cultural and historical background is important. It means you, like Pearson, likely heard war stories, and, if you grew up in Europe like my friend Pete, you saw war debris and old garden air raid shelters in your neighbourhood. Even if you grew up in North America, like me, you likely watched Rat Patrol, Combat, Hogan's Heroes, etc on TV, you likely read comics like Sgt. Rock and Haunted Tank, and you likely remember the smell of plastic glue melting polystyrene as you struggled with Airfix models. That is, if you were a boy, as this book is unabashedly about the masculine world. I don't recall girls of my generation reading Sgt. Rock or playing Avalon Hill's Blitzkrieg, which probably explains why my friends' wives don't do much more than lovingly (if we're lucky) tolerate their husband's wargaming obsessions. I suppose I could say more about this aspect if I had a degree in gender studies, but I think the dichotomy is pretty obvious.

If you didn't grow up in the 1950s or 60s, then the world Pearson describes is likely foreign to you. My fifteen year old daughter's cultural map does not include any of the TV shows mentioned above - she told me recently that she had never even heard of Hogan's Heroes. My thirteen year old son knows a Schmeisser machine pistol from a bazooka, which makes me proud, but he's learned that invaluable information from playing games like Medal of Valour on computer gaming consoles. He's more likely to want to play with Space Marines and Space Orks then he is to want to play with WW2 "army men" and as Pearson (and I) did at that age, shout things like "take that, Hun" or "for you ze var is over, Englander". For my son and daughter's generation, history seems to be a generic place called "the past" where the historical eras depicted in Orlando Bloom films (antiquity, the Crusades, pirate times) are all jumbled up and happened more or less at the same time.

So all of that to say that the likely readers of Harry Pearson are likely to be people like me - male, middle aged or getting there, and obsessed with war because we grew up under its shadow, and unlike our parents' generation, who had their fill of it, we still want to play it. The word "play" is one of Pearson's themes, for he is understandably self-conscious about being a middle aged man with a wife and a family and a mortgage who spends valuable hours of his remaining years of life painting and playing with miniature soldiers or "little men" as my own wife calls them. Reviewers readily jump on this theme; Britain's Guardian called the book a tribute to "the fine art of time wasting".

Pearson tells a hilarious story of being cornered on a commuter train by a corpulent "extrovert geek" who recognizes a kindred spirit when he spots the copy of Wargames Illustrated magazine that Pearson is reading. "I should have said, 'This is for my son. He's just turned eleven so I'm hoping he'll soon drop this foolish toy soldier lark in favour of solvent abuse and masturbation'. But these thngs never come to you until after the event, do they?" (p. 234). As the fellow bellows at him from several seats away, Pearson describes how "Whatever was left of my self-esteem shrivelled to the size of a walnut and attempted to throw itself out of the window" (p. 234).

I've recognized the same challenge to my self-esteem on many occasions. At the last wargames convention I visited, the hotel was thronged with men, mostly from age 30-50+, many quite overweight, many calling their parent's basement home, and many apparently quite unfamiliar with the rudiments of personal hygeine judging from the pungent aroma hanging over the hall. To see so many chaps in appalling T Shirts (eg, "Hitler's European Tour, 1939 - 1945: Poland, Holland, Denmark, France, etc" - hilarious!), debating the merits of which rules system best captures morale tests for cavalry charges, and fondling ziplocked bags of lead figures, leads to the inescapable question, "am I one of these?" But look beyond the unwashed bodies to the fruits of their imagination and passion - tables with scenery that often would rival the best of a model railroad group, figures painted with loving attention to detail, and a shared interest in the past, and you see something quite extraordinary. You see boys (and the occasional girl) who were given a bag of crudely molded army men as children, and who immediately longed for the day when as adults they could do so much more - build armies with the money they would earn as adults, make life-sized buildings instead of using lego or wooden blocks, and meet in like-minded fraternities free of the bullying and fashion-ruled mindlessness that reigned in their school corridors. Here they are now, mostly jovial and good natured, often quite self-mocking, mostly loving if slightly eccentric parents and spouses, and here is a world that they have created, a world of tongue-in-cheek heroism, creativity, and wonder. As Pearson concludes, "Every man needs a place to go, Montaigne had said, and for better or worse, this was mine".

Schweinfurt, GermanyThe US Army sergeants waited on the couch, studying the floor. Family dogs skirted the sofa, growling. From time to time, one of the soldiers extended a conciliatory hand to them.

On the floor, sixth-grader Rebecca Aguayo played a video game; her twin rollerbladed outside. Just one voice fed the tension in the living room: Their mother, Helga, sat in an armchair, bawling. "It was the ugly crying, with the snot and everything," Mrs. Aguayo recalls, "I wanted them to see how much they were hurting us."

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

A Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday After PentecostGrace and St. George’s, 12 August, 2007

Isaiah 1:1,10-20; Psalm 50; Hebrews 11:1-3,8-16; Luke 12:32-40

Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them. (Luke 12:37)

In these difficult times that the church finds itself in, isn’t it interesting how we seem to spend so much time talking about sex, when Jesus seems to be more interested in what we do with our money? Today, for the second time in two Sundays, we have heard from chapter twelve of Luke’s gospel, in which Jesus continues his “less is more” message. “Sell your possessions, and give alms” (Luke 12:33), and last week we heard our Lord say “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” (Lk 12:15). These are challenging messages, and it’s tempting for a preacher to back away from them, lest people start to complain that “my church is always asking the same people to give more and more”. But the fact remains, that God makes demands on his people, and God expects us to be accountable for how we use our time, our talent, and our treasure.

Faced with these demands, our first response tends to be “how much do I have to give?”, as if God’s approval and our salvation was something that we could buy, provided it’s affordable. However, I don’t think this is the question God wants us to answer. Here in Luke’s twelfth chapter and in many other places, Jesus confronts us with a different question: “how much do I really need?” In her sermon last week, which I read with great interest, Patsy helped us to understand this question in terms of things temporal and things eternal. “Things temporal” means all the transitory stuff that gets us through life – food, clothing, shelter – our necessities. Things eternal are what makes our life worthwhile, the things that really count.

You may have seen the bumper sticker, “Whoever dies with the most toys wins”. It’s a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek kind of message, but it makes a shrewd comment on our society’s relentless desire to consume and acquire. As we saw in the parable in last week’s gospel, the rich fool is not a winner, despite his abundance of possessions. The things he gained in life did give him security and did not give his life value. In other words, Jesus asked us last week if we want quantity in life, or do we want quality of life? Quantity or quality?

The question, do we want quantity of life or do we want quality of life may seem innocent, but it’s actually a difficult one to answer because it makes us fearful. Our society encourages us to think that security comes from quantity. Words in today’s gospel like “possessions” and “purses” and “treasure” have enormous power in our lives. We put our faith in these things because of our fear – fear of dependency on others, fear of poverty in our retirement, fear of being considered a failure in the eyes of the more successful. Now these things show signs of failing us. How many people this week are nervously watching the stock markets and wondering where things are going? I’m not an economist, but I understand that things are so shaky at present because a lot of people who didn’t really have money were leant money to buy homes and were then encouraged to borrow more money against the value of their homes so they could go shop at places like Wal-Mart. This system worked as long as the value of homes was grossly over-inflated, but now that the house of cards is collapsing. People talk about a correction in the markets, as if the market was a God who passes judgment on us when we make mistakes, punishing us for our financial sins and errors. As the preacher Will Willmon says, people today fear the judgments of the market more than we fear the judgments of a righteous God.

So what if we took fear out of the mix? What if we put the question another way, not quantity vs. quality, but true abundance vs. false abundance? What if we stopped thinking about the things that God wants to take away from us, and started thinking about the things that God wants to give us? Notice the first thing Jesus says in today’s gospel lesson – “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Lk 12:32). Jesus tells us to stop worrying about what God wants to take from us, and invites us to open ourselves up to God’s generosity.

Notice how the parable in today’s gospel works. It is late at night, and a group of servants are ready for their master’s return from a wedding banquet. As soon as they hear him at the door they are ready to spring into action. You might be expecting the servants to come running with water so he can wash away the dust of the road, or perhaps a clean soft road and refreshments after his journey. But then, in a way that’s so typical of his proverbs, Jesus takes an unexpected direction: “truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them” Wait a minute, you might have said as you listened, I didn’t see that coming, but that’s how Jesus works. In Mark’s gospel we hear Jesus say In the Incarnation, "the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many" (Mark 10:45), and in John’s gospel we see this idea enacted in the story of Maundy Thursday, when Jesus kneels and washes his disciples’ feet. Again and again we need to be reminded that Christ came to serve us, so that we may have new and better life.

As I understand today’s gospel, Jesus is telling us to stop worrying, to stop trying to serve ourselves by buying into the world’s security, and to start letting God serve us the good things of his kingdom. Trade the false abundance of the world for the rich and real abundance of God. Allow God’s generosity to touch us in this way, and we will be changed. “Sell your possessions and give alms”, we heard Jesus say. The word “alms” comes from a Greek word which can mean "to be gracious" or "to show mercy" or "to feel sympathy". How could the world be changed if more of us were filled with mercy and sympathy? Did you know that North Americans spend $33 billion in weight loss products and services each year and $12 billion yearly on video rentals. Did you know that it’s been estimated that for an additional $13 billion each year, a fraction of what the world spends on weapons, basic nutrition and health care needs could be met around the world.

How could this happen, we ask? I think God is constantly showing us how this could happen. World Vision Canada, for example, can often triple its donors’ dollars to maximise their impact. In one small part of Zimbabwe in Africa, one World Vision project has managed to provide 1 furnished classroom, textbooks for thirteen schools, vocational training for 7 high school dropouts, two houses for refugee families, 74 toilets, medical assistance for 126 orphans and vulnerable children, training for 71 church workers to help reduce the stigma of AIDS/HIV, and 6 community talks on issues affecting girl children and the rights of children. One, seven, seventy-four, one hundred twenty-six – these are numbers that we can get our heads around. These things are doable, and they start with us. I don’t intend this to be an advertisement for World Vision, but I’m pleased that my few sponsorship dollars can help make a difference in one place.

“Be dressed for action and have your lamps lit”, Jesus tells his followers. Some Christians have taken this to be a warning to expect the Second Coming at any time. A more helpful way of understanding, I think, is to take this as a reminder for us to be alert and ready to do God’s work. In the first lesson, the prophet Isaiah warned Israel not to be smug and complacent in its religious services, but to do God’s will in the word: “learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow”. God has blessed us in so many ways – how can we share those blessings? How can we get ready to do God’s work? We expect our firefighters and police to be ready at a moment’s notice to come and help us. Are we as Christians ready and willing to do God’s work in the world? Are we as a parish alert for opportunities to be God’s people, ready to answer God’s call at an unexpected hour? In the book of Hebrews we heard that God’s people “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one”. We all want to live in a “better country”, but today’s scriptures remind us that our hope is for more than a heavenly reward. Our hope is also a better country of God’s abundance here on earth, and it starts with us. As an old African spiritual says, “I wanna be ready”. Today is an opportunity for us to say, like the servants in our Lord’s parable, “we wanna be ready”.

Monday, August 13, 2007

What do Harry Potter (especially in the first HP novel) and Jesus Christ have in common? Other than being the heros of bestselling books, both are (as imagined by J.K. Rowling and Anne Rice respectively) young boys who are growing into miraculous powers, who are destined to fight evil powers, who are trying to unravel the mysteries of their earliest years, and who are surrounded by adults and parent figures who won't tell them everything they want to know.

Northrop Frye once said that there are only so many stories in the world, and they are simply retold with variations. I don't know whether Rice or Rowling had any influence on one another, or whether they are both playing variations on a 2,000 year old tune. I do know that I enjoyed Rice's Christ the Lord (CtheL)far more than I had expected to.

The childhood of Jesus has fascinated Christians throughout the centuries. If you believe in the divinity of Jesus, then you have to wonder, "when did he know what he was and who he was"? The canonical or approved scripture of the church is largely silent on the question, except for St. Luke's account of the young Jesus calmly discussing law and theology with the priests of the temple during his parents' stay in Jerusalem (Luke 2:41-52). However, a number of the non-canonical gospels and accounts of Jesus' life from the earliest days of the church tell many stories about miracles and acts of power that Jesus did as a young boy. These stories include making clay birds fly, causing another boy to drop dead, and then bringing him back to life. One of the most charming of these stories, which was well loved in the Middle Ages, tells of how the young Jesus made an apple tree bend down so his mother Mary could pluck the sweetest fruit from its high branches.

Christ the Lord borrows from this tradition of apocryphal accounts of Jesus' early life. However, Anne Rice has made it clear that her understanding of the story is orthodox, that she believes that Jesus was the son of God. Her book can be understood as an extended meditation on Luke's comment that "The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favour of God was upon him (Lk 2:40). As a gifted storyteller, she portrays Jesus growing into his identity, as he tries to comprehend the reluctance of the adults around him to explain the circumstances of his birth, including the flight into Egypt to escape King Herod's massacre of the young boys in Bethlehem. She shows an impressive understanding of life in the ancient world, including cultural clashes between Jews and gentiles, and her characters have an authentic humanity about them, as if she has freed them from their iconic places in our culture.

I picked up this book not knowing what to expect. I knew of Anne Rice from years ago through some of her vampire novels and some of her erotic writing, and so I was not expecting to be sympathetic to her handling of the story. What I didn't know was that during the years of work that she put into this book, reading a massive amount of material from Christian and secular scholars (her bibliography alone is worth the price of the book), Anne Rice became deeply convinced that Jesus was who he said he was, the Son of God. In a moving epilogue, Rice describes how the writing led her back to the Catholic faith of her childhood, but with a new and richer understanding of who Jesus was and who she was. As a person of faith myself, I found Rice's story as moving as her fictional account of the young Jesus. I find it miraculous in itself that Rice, with a fan following of millions, is bringing the Christian story to millions who might not otherwise have time for it.

I would recommend this book to Christians who want to gain a deeper insight into the world of Jesus, and want to enrich their devotional lives - they will find much to meditate on here. I hope non-Christians also read this book; they will find much to ponder here.

Something in us dreams of our own destruction. Perhaps it is the spirit of our age, the pessimism that seeps into us with the news that resources are running out, that the world is dying and we are sickening, that the terrorists will get us. Esquire magazine's review said that it is "exactly what a book about our future should be like" I don't know if The Road is a product of this pessimism. Lesser books I've read, like Max Brook's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars, actively trade on our media-implanted fears that we are living in an end-time with no saving rapture to hope for. Certainly that's how the publishers view it. I was bemused to find in the bibliographical data that it is cross-referenced with books about 3) Regression (Civilisation) - Fiction and 4. Survival skills - Fiction. Wow - I had no idea that Regression (Civilisation) was a legitimate sub-genre in its own right - lots of cheery reading there, to be sure.

Perhaps this labeling would amuse McCarthy, who I sense is too smart a writer to acknowledge that he is naming the fears of our own day. Like Samuel Beckett, he wants to peel as way as many layers of our lives as possible to find the core things that keep us alive. Maybe McCarthy is more interested in a timeless existentialism than the threats lurking in today's headlines, but one thing is for sure, this book scared the pants off me regardless. Look up reviews for The Road and you'll find words like "harrowing" and "unspeakable" used freely, and aptly, I would say.

I love McCarthy, something I say on the strength of what I've read of him so far, All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of his novels set on the Texas-Mexico border. McCarthy's prose is both sparing and poetic, his landscapes harsh and unforgiving, his characters are tough, alienated, and are driven by moral codes that don't always serve them well in the world they move in.

The backstory of The Road is only hinted at. There was a nuclear war, and the boy was born the night after the bombs fell and as the cities burned. This boy is the key to the novel. He has miraculously survived years of nuclear winter, starvation, and the descent of America into savage tribes of cannibals. There is an innate goodness to the boy, his concern that he and his father are "the good guys", and his desire to help the few unfortunates they meet on the way. The father is convinced that the boy is "the only thing godspoke left in the world (if God didnt speak in the boy he never spoke at all)" and therefore his goal is to save the boy for an unknown future in a dead world. The boy's mother on the other hand lost all faith that life had any purpose, even that they were alive, and took her life.

There is a vortex at the heart of this book, a kind of black hole of nullity that rips away everythign - names of states and months, creeds and debates, memories, identities, hope. The boy's mother speaks of it in a remembered conversation before her suicide: "As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope for it with all my heart". The man resists this vision, but it is as if he can only carry a few scraps of memory and humanity into a hopeless future: "Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember". Within this conflict of nothingness versus tattered hope is a second tension, the boy's innocent goodness, as evidenced by his desire to help the few other unfortunates they encounter, and the man's grim and survival-focused selfishness.

Amidst the horrors and challenges of this book is the sheer pleasure of McCarthy's command of language. Scrabble-players will feast on the richness of language; it is as if McCarthy is deliberately and routinely confronting us with unknown, half-understood words, perplexing the reader and reinforcing the sense of a world turned alien and meaningless. I offer a short list of examples:

"The cold illucid world""He descended into a gryke in the stone""They were discalced to a man like pilgrims of some common order for their shoes were long since stolen."

It's tempting to ask what sort of hope McCarthy offers in this bleak future. To be sure there is goodness. The boy has learned from his father that they are "the good guys", which makes them a distinct minority in this cannibal-haunted landscape. What future there is for goodness, hope, or the place of God is for the reader to decide. For myself, I'm haunted by the elegiac final paragraph, a look back to a pre-lapsarian time when the earth was rich and beautiful, "Of a thing which could not be put back. Or be made right again", and I can't help but think that this book's future stands perilously close to our present.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

A Sermon for the Eighth Sunday After PentecostGrace and St. George’s at St. Ansgar’s Lutheran Church, 22 July, 2007

Jesus Visits Martha and MaryNow as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’ Luke 10:38-42

I had the pleasure of preaching this at St. Ansgar's Lutheran Church (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada) last Sunday. This is the second year that our parishes (St. Ansgar's and Grace/St. George's) have gotten together for worship in the summer in the spirit of the Waterloo Declaration.

One of the great pleasures of summertime is visiting friends, and what better way is there to visit with friends than to eat with them? I am sure that the reason we Anglicans are back with you today is because of the wonderful ice cream you treated us to after the service last year! Today I want to talk about our gospel lesson and what it says about hospitality, our relationships to one another, and our relationship to our Lord Jesus Christ. Our gospel confronts us with the question, do put God first in our lives, or do we put ourselves first?

The other night friends dropped over for desert, which we enjoyed in the warm breeze on our deck. Our friends had brought their trademark ice-cream bar desert with carmel sauce, much to the delight of my teenage daughter. We offered a jello with fresh strawberries that my wife Kay and I had picked at Heemans last month. And of course, coffee. We had a wonderful evening, and our friends insisted we keep the ice cream (no argument from my daughter) while we insisted they take the remaining strawberries (only a token argument on our friends' part). Part of the pleasure of this exchange was the knowledge of how the care that went into the preparation of the food. Would the visit have gone as well if our friend hadn't worked in her kitchen, if we hadn't made the trip out to Heemans and spent an hour in the field, if I hadn't tidied the deck and put out extra chairs, and if my daughter hadn't set the table? We might have sat around for two hours over an empty table and chatted, but the visit would have been lacking in warmth and hospitality.

Today's gospel, the visit of Jesus to the home of Martha and Mary, is often understood as a lesson urging us to be less busy and more quiet. The church has traditionally talked about business and quietness in terms of the Active Life, our normal lives in the world, and the Contemplative Life, which is chosen by monastics or by laypeople who chose to go on retreats or who try and find quiet times of prayer and meditation. Mary, who choses to spend time at Jesus' feet listening to his teaching, is often said to exemplify the Contemplative Life, while poor Martha who resents working alone in the kitchen, is said to embody the Active Life. This kind of reading ends with a simple moral, that we spend more quiet time in our prayer lives, like Mary, and less time with the matters of the world, like Martha.

The only problem with such a reading, I fear, is that it doesn't work, especially in churches. As I'm sure that Pastor Elina would agree with me, a successful church needs its Marthas. Our Marthas cater funeral lunches and organize choir practices and prepare bulletins and tend the church building and cook outreach dinners and do a hundred other things that allows a church's ministry to continue. Indeed, being a Martha is a valid ministry for many Christians. Without these people we pastors, who usually make very poor Marthas, would flounder. We depend on Marthas to make things happen and keep us organized.

By the same token, if my family and our guests had not acted as Marthas the other night, we would have had a pretty thin time of it. We might have gathered around an empty table for prayer and bible study, and no doubt the Holy Spirit would have come into our midst, but there would have been something lacking in our welcome and in our friendship. As you Lutherans know very well, God invented coffee and baking to get people to come to bible studies.

If we look at the first line of today's gospel I think we see it's theme stated quite clearly: "a woman named Martha welcomed [Jesus] into her home" (Lk 10:35). The word "welcome" is an important one in scripture, especially in Luke. You might remember that two weeks ago, we heard in Luke's gospel how Jesus sent out the seventy, and told them "Whenever you enter a town and its people welcome you, eat what is set before you" (Lk 10:8). In such places and in such moments, Jesus tells his followers, "the kingdom of God has come near" (Lk 10:11). So clearly welcoming another person and caring for their needs is part of our relationship both to one another and to God. Many of our parishioners at Grace and St. George's learned the truth of this when we participated in the Out of the Cold meal program at St. John the Evangelist's church in London. So clearly we can't fault Martha for busying herself to welcome the Master.

Neither, I think, can we fault Mary, "who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying" (Lk 10:39), despite what her sister might say. What's interesting about this passage is not the description of what Jesus was saying (indeed, Luke does not report a single word of Jesus' teaching) but rather Luke's description of how Mary listens to it. As others have noted, Mary's posture is submissive in the best sense of the word, putting Jesus and his teaching above all else going on around her. Again, if we look back to Luke 10, Mary embodies the kind of faithful obedience that Jesus tells the seventy to look for. Jesus' instructions "say to them, 'The kingdom of God has come near to you'" (Lk 10:9). Jesus knows that the kingdom of heaven can only come near when there are ears that want to hear and hearts that want to be changed. Hospitality, making someone welcome in the Lord’s name, thus come to stand for an openness to God's word and a willingness to place one's self entirely under the direction of God.

Meanwhile, we can imagine Martha banging her pots and stomping around in the kitchen, as angry cooks do, until she finally loses it to storm out and confront Jesus. Luke describers her as being "distracted by her many tasks". What does this mean? I know by some experience that when my wife is cooking she does not welcome being distracted. Typically she is concentrating on juggling three or four things at once so everything can finish cooking together. When I come in to the kitchen and say something inconsequential to distract her, she does not take it kindly! Somehow I don't think this is the kind of distraction that is bothering Martha. Martha lacks the submission to Christ, both physical and spiritual, that her sister is showing.

Have you ever heard the expression, "It's all about me?" Look at Martha's words to Jesus and you'll see that attitude on display. Look at how often she uses the first person pronoun: "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself ? Tell her then to help me" (Lk 10:40). Martha's words reveal her basic self-centeredness. She may call Jesus Lord but clearly her plans and her place in the house are more important than finding out what Jesus' plans and her place in his kingdom might be. There is a place for the first-person in prayer, but it should always be balanced with an awareness of God, as in the beloved prayer of St. Francis, “make me a channel of your peace”.

When our Lectionary works, it can work very well. Take a minute to think back to our second reading, from Colossians. What does Colossians say about this visitor who has come to dwell under the humble roof of Martha and Mary? St. Paul says this:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. (Col 1:15-20)

This is truly a portrait of Christ as the Alpha and Omega. How can Mary, or how can any of us, put ourselves first and still call ourselves followers of He who has “first place in everything” (Luke 10:18). And when we try, as best we can, to understand this incredible cosmic power that has come together as a human visitor, we have to wonder in gratitude at how gently he corrects Martha and opens her eyes to her “Me First” attitude.

“There is need of only one thing”, Jesus says. “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her." What does Jesus mean by this? Let me return to St. Paul to answer this question. In Colossians Paul writes that Jesus has come to “reconcile all things” and “make peace” by rescuing us “ who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds” (Col 1:21). There are all sorts of “evil deeds” and some of them seem quite innocuous. Martha, angrily banging pots and pans in the kitchen, is a warning to all of us who put our own importance and our own just deserts ahead of what we owe to God. Jesus’ words to Martha are an act of reconciliation, drawing Martha out of her hostility and drawing her into the peace and presence of God.

We in our ordinary churches and in our humble homes are incredibly privileged to share these spaces with Jesus Christ, the Lord of Creation. He who has “first place in everything”, comes under our roofs, graciously wishing to know us and dwell with us. How will we know him and welcome him? It is not a question of praying more and working less. A church whose members wear out their knees in prayer but never bothers with hospitality and fellowship would be sadly lacking in its relationship with God because we would never experience God in life as it is meant to be lived, including laughter, friendship and rich deserts! At the same time, a church that delighted in social events, but whose members never bothered with prayer and bible study, also fails because it would be like a body without a head, never knowing the one in whose name it gathers. There is a time or us to be Marthas, and a time for us to be Marys, but always, always, we must ask ourselves, do we invite our Lord Jesus Christ to have first place in everything we do? May we always be churches that put God first, may we always be churches were our Lord is “pleased to dwell”.